Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 11-231164 (Patent Literature 1) describes an optical fiber holder including a holder main body and two covers attached to the holder main body in an openable and closable manner. The holder main body includes a positioning groove in which a coated optical fiber exposed out of an optical fiber cord is received and positioned, a cord portion groove that receives a cord portion of the optical fiber cord, and a groove-shaped space which is located between the positioning groove and the cord portion groove and where high strength fibers around the coated optical fiber are separated. One of the covers fixes the coated optical fiber received in the positioning groove, and the other cover fixes the cord portion received in the cord portion groove.
To hold the coated optical fiber by using the optical fiber holder, the high strength fibers are separated and routed backward through both side portions of the space formed in the holder main body. Since the high strength fibers are tightly disposed around the coated optical fiber, separating the high strength fibers from the coated optical fiber and taking them out of the space is a cumbersome, time-consuming task. Further, since an operator manually separates the high strength fibers and takes them out, the quality of the task depends on the skill of the operator. For example, when the coated optical fiber is fusion spliced to another, a low-skilled operator can accidentally burn the high strength fibers due to high temperature in a fusion discharge process or allow the high strength fibers to come into contact with the fusion spliced portion, resulting in a decrease in quality of the spliced coated optical fibers.